I certainly would be interested in getting my hands on the PM code. Mostly for personal reasons: I'm wondering how much work it would actually be to convert all the PM data into a modern database layout with completly new, modernized codebase.

For the last couple of months i have been thinking about that problem. Seems like a lot of work. But what i really want to know: Is it actually possible? Would i be able to do it? I bet i can, but i have to prove it (to myself, mostly).

Your intuition is correct: it would be a lot of work. But I have some observations to offer you which I believe should add some perspective on the problem:

One one hand, the database schema of user-posted nodes is relatively clean and straightforward. If you wanted to create an entirely new site without necessarily any feature compatility with this one, but with a starting nodebase of PerlMonks' existing user-posted nodes, you could conceivably do that without much work, I think. (Issues of user accounts and node ownership aside.)

On the other hand, if your intent was to re-implement the functional features of PerlMonks, more or less, you'd face a prodigious amount of work. And there is a certain terra incognita of features available only to the gods which, unless you got one of them to join in your project, you'd just have to reinvent to your own liking. (That is to say, even pmdev don't have access to the code of those features.)

Nonetheless, I have it in mind to create a "new PerlMonks" using Perl 6, doing a lot of things differently based on "lessons learned" from the experiences here, but preserving as much as possible the foundational philosophies of this site. See New PerlMonks for Perl 6 - A Good Idea

I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16,000 zombies.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other